eBook Summit 2010

Did you attend or present at Mediabistro's eBook Summit? Do you wish you had? Check out the digital artifacts I've aggregated and curated from this future-of-publishing-is-now (or yesterday?) event held in NYC on December 15, 2010 at The New Yorker Hotel.

Finally, please note that I haven't reviewed the program in its entirety. I've limited my scope to the speakers and comments that appealed most to me. In other words, beware of bias. You'll find plenty. I'm unabashedly optimistic about the future of publishing. I am easily enthused by tools that dilate/amplify the storyteller's toolbox. And I'm driven by a narrow and specific ambition: discern the most effective and most complementary platforms for sharing my stories... Curatorial belly button gazing? Perhaps!

Publishing hasn't seen this much change in its 800-year history. New technologies bring a wave of opportunities as they disrupt regular print cycles and business models. Books are consumed digitally on portable devices, a new opportunity for authors and publishers to produce multimedia content. Authors can self-publish without the support of a major publishing house and find an audience through social media. As major publishers shift their businesses, new upstarts launch ideas for sharing digita

A year after Jane Friedman sketched the broad strokes at the first summit, Cahill was there to offer, as one observer noted, something of an Open Road annual report. He showed a video, and noted that the company hopes to have 2,000 titles available soon, including more e-riginals—original e-books—which he said were a small part of the company's business, but were critical to its identity.

Cahill spoke about how Open Road Media uses the Internet to connect their readers to authors. The digital publisher creates author pages with videos and photos, as well as social media accounts to help build a platform for the write online. “We follow the marketing process to empower the author to connect with readers,” he said.

Cahill was followed by Dale Peck (@MandMBooks) who is the co-founder of Mischief and Mayhem and the author or ten books. He started out by explaining, "Fundamentally I’m an imposter up here. I started out as a novelist…"

Peck, meanwhile, talked about his sort of anti-book business, the direct to consumer Mischief and Mayhem bookselling venture, which he said arose out of a desire to offer an alternative to a broken bookselling model in the age of the superstore in which writers take home too little money. "For a $25 hardcover book," he noted, "publishers are lucky to see a dollar."

Mischief and Mayhem's Dale Peck told the story of its "protest" event on the sidewalk outside the Union Square Barnes & Noble in New York City. When authors attempted to sell their books through the store's free wifi, B&N turned off access.

Chapman, meanwhile, talked about the challenges of marketing literary fiction, a challenge long before the Internet, and about FSG's new blog and marketing efforts that focus on creating new newsletter content for subscribers.